Engineering Cloud Services with Sam Kottler

“A lot of our customers are kind of AWS refugees who really don’t want all the stuff amazon has, and they just want a really easy to use system that is reliable.”

Operating a data center has been turned into a service. For most new companies, managing real-world servers is no longer an issue. But one exception is if your startup is a company offering the data center as a service. In this episode, Jeff and Sam talk about the engineering that goes on at DigitalOcean, and how the company differentiates itself from its competitors.

Sam Kottler is an engineering manager at DigitalOcean, and previously worked at Red Hat.

Questions

What were my options before DigitalOcean was created?

If I choose to go with DigitalOcean over AWS, what are the tradeoffs I am making?

What happens on DigitalOcean’s end when I spin up a droplet on the online portal?

What economies of scale could you get if you moved all droplets from VMs to containers?

What happens when the server my droplet is on dies?

Can you talk about a distributed systems problem that you’ve dealt with that seemed unbelievable?

What’s in the future for DigitalOcean?

Links

Sponsors

DigitalOcean is the simplest cloud hosting provider. Use promo code SEDAILY for $10 in free credit.

Wealthfront is the automated investment service that manages your investments online. Check out wealthfront.com/sedaily to get your first $15,000 managed for free, as a listener of Software Engineering Daily.